Blackout EDC
Launched an automated affiliate commerce platform and its first storefront: curated all-black everyday carry gear with automated product ingest, review discovery, and click analytics. New niche stores ship as configuration.
Inside the system.
Overview.
Blackout EDC is a curated affiliate storefront with one rule: if it is not fully blacked-out, it is not sold. Underneath it is the real product: a multi-store commerce platform where product ingest, review discovery, and click attribution are automated, and a whole new niche storefront is a configuration change, not a rebuild.
Affiliate commerce is usually a content treadmill: research products, write listings, hunt down credible reviews, maintain links, repeat forever. Run it by hand and the catalog stalls; spin up a second niche and you rebuild the entire site. The leverage is not any single storefront. It is a platform where curation stays human, taste stays the brand, and everything mechanical is automated.
We built the platform as a monorepo with one storefront codebase and per-store design tokens and copy, so each store keeps its own identity while sharing every system underneath. The mechanical layer is automated: a product ingest API feeds the catalog, scheduled jobs discover credible YouTube reviews for each product, outbound clicks are tracked and attributed, and an admin console manages it all. Email runs through the same platform. The first store proves the model. Blackout EDC sells a point of view, monochrome everyday carry with honest reviews, and the strict curation rule is the brand. Launching the next niche store is a new configuration, not a new build.
Original product: platform architecture, storefront, automation pipelines, analytics, and brand.
- 01One codebase, per-store theming: new stores ship as configuration
- 02Automated product ingest and YouTube review discovery
- 03Click tracking and attribution on every outbound link
- 04Curation rule as brand: if it is not blacked-out, it is not sold
The public case file stops here.
The full dossier goes deeper: architecture decisions, timelines, what broke and how we fixed it, and the numbers we don't publish. We share it with teams evaluating us for serious work, usually on a walkthrough call.
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